Shared Memories: stories round the fire

Most of what we publish in Perspectives about travel comes to us secondhand – a dispatch from an airport lounge, a photo essay from a time zone eight hours out of step with us, an email written on a moving train. But every culture, if you go back far enough, has some version of the same scene: people in a circle, a fire in the middle, someone telling a story about a place they’ve been. It’s one of the few human habits that has survived every technological advancement since. So when it came to gathering ten of our storytellers together – the writers and photographers whose travel tales have shaped Perspectives over the past months – we went looking for an actual flame. We found one at ROKA Charlotte Street, where the whole restaurant is built around a fire – the robata grill glowing in the centre of the room all day, whether it's lit for weekend brunch or a post-theatre dinner.

ROKA opened here in 2004, the first solo venture that the restaurateur Rainer Becker launched after Zuma, and more than 20 years and nine further robatayaki outposts around the world later, it still has the pull of an original. The interior was designed around fire’s strength and energy – concrete, stone and dark wood arranged so your eye is always led back to the robata grill, where skewers of meat and fish char and smoke in full view of the room. Beneath it all, the Shochu Lounge keeps its own low-lit hours in the basement, with a drinks list built around the distilled spirit it’s named for, poured into house infusions and cocktails alongside Japanese whiskies. Sitting on Charlotte Street in London’s media district, it felt like the right home for people who make their living translating faraway places into words and images.

There’s something in hearing travel stories told aloud rather than scrolled past on a screen. Someone talked about the particular quality of light in the Atlas Mountains at dusk; another told of the strange grief of leaving a place they’d only lived in for a season. Someone else said the trip they’d written about fondly had been a disaster at the time – the good stories rarely come from the smooth trips.

The food kept pace with the storytelling, arriving off the robata in waves. Yellowtail sashimi with yuzu and truffle dressing; chutoro, salmon and hamachi alongside a tuna tartare topped with oscietra caviar; spicy tuna maki and wagyu sushi. Bowls of rock shrimp tempura came with a wasabi pea and chilli mayonnaise, and crab and black cod dumplings in a roasted chilli dressing. Off the grill: lamb cutlets, portobello mushrooms with chilli and garlic, black cod marinated in yuzu miso, and an Angus beef fillet – the clean, produce-led Japanese cooking that made ROKA’s name two decades ago and still holds up against places half its age. A ROKA dessert platter rounded things off, the robata still smoking as we got up to leave – a night full of good food and even better stories.

Visit ROKA 

37 Charlotte Street, London W1T 1RR